Release notes for Lifetype 1.2.5

Description

Lifetype 1.2.5 is the latest maintenance release of the 1.2 branch and after five maintenance releases, this is as stable and rock-solid as it gets. Continuing with the trend started in the 1.2 branch, Lifetype 1.2.5 delivers a couple of minor new features and some polish under the hood, specially concerning the API. We have noticed that as of late, there has been a somewhat remarkable increase of support issues and bug reports related to the API, so it finally seems like users and developers have started to realize the potential of the fully-featured and documented API that you get with Lifetype (and for free!) We're happy to see such trend and we'll continue to support and encourage enterprising users to make the best out of Lifetype classes and libraries.

Download

If upgrading from Lifetype 1.2.4, there are packages available which only include new or modified files and will allow you to upgrade from Lifetype 1.2.4 only. These packages can not be used to upgrade from 1.1.x or 1.2 to 1.2.5:

New features

The following features have been introduced in Lifetype 1.2.5.

"Bookmarkable" filters

Some screens in Lifetype support filtering based on certain conditions but so far there was no easy way to save those filters so that for example we could quickly access the list of users marked as disabled and whose username starts with "a". As of Lifetype 1.2.5, there is a small icon that looks like a link next to each group of filters. This icon is nothing but a link pointing to the current page with its filtered values, so all you need to do is bookmark this link in your browser for future usage.

Totally disable the data cache

So far there was no way to disable the data cache, the layer that is responsible of saving data loaded from the database to disk for faster access later, so we have added some additional code for the very few cases where disabling the data cache is needed.

In order to disable the cache, edit the file config/cache.properties.php and make the following change:

$config["cache_method"] = "null";

Setting cache_method to 'null' will effectively disable the data cache.

Notification of new blogs

When a new blog is registered via summary.php, administrators can now optionally receive a notification message informing them of the new regsitration regardless of the status of the blog.

Issues fixed

In addition to the API fixes mentioned above, there's two long standing issues that have been addressed in this release: Lifetype can finally handle backslashes comfortably and the size of thumbnails is correctly calculated when keeping the aspect ratio and using the GD backend. An important issue that was allowing spam comments to be saved to the database instead of being rejected as spam has also been fixed has also been fixed.

This is the full list of issues fixed in Lifetype 1.2.5, extracted from the project's bug tracking system:

1359: Fix for Blogs::getAllBlogs()1366: Files uploaded to the wrong destination when using the API1367: "Default article category" not working1141: Backslashes getting filtered1356: Font options greyed out after preview1376: Joomla user data provider not working with Joomla older than 1.0.131382: In the edit categories menu, a 0 is shown incorrectly if there aren't any published articles in a category.1380: Conditionally show categories on the main page is broken.1386: Spammers are able to post comments even if comments are disabled for a particular post1387: comments with article_id = 0 created by some spam bots1392: PluginTemplatedView not using cache anyway1395: BlogNameValidator() will cause add blog error even the Chinese blog name is valid1396: Templates directory hardcoded in baserequestgenerator.class.php1400: PDbResultSet::GetArray() missing1409: Problems displaying article categories1413: Dots as part of a category name do not work with custom URLs1407: final_size_thumbnail is calculated wrong